Book contents
- Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel
- Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Appendixes
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Rethinking the Secular at the Origins of the English Novel
- Part II Versions of Biblical Authority
- Part III Uses of Scripture for Fiction
- Chapter 6 Traveling Papers: Pilgrim’s Progress and the Book
- Chapter 7 Surprised by Providence: Robinson Crusoe as Defoe’s Theory of Fiction
- Chapter 8 Resilient to Narrative: Clarissa after Reading
- Chapter 9 Breaking Down Shame: Narrating Trauma and Repair in Tristram Shandy
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Chapter 9 - Breaking Down Shame: Narrating Trauma and Repair in Tristram Shandy
from Part III - Uses of Scripture for Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2021
- Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel
- Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Appendixes
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Rethinking the Secular at the Origins of the English Novel
- Part II Versions of Biblical Authority
- Part III Uses of Scripture for Fiction
- Chapter 6 Traveling Papers: Pilgrim’s Progress and the Book
- Chapter 7 Surprised by Providence: Robinson Crusoe as Defoe’s Theory of Fiction
- Chapter 8 Resilient to Narrative: Clarissa after Reading
- Chapter 9 Breaking Down Shame: Narrating Trauma and Repair in Tristram Shandy
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Chapter 9 focuses on the two chapters that go missing near the end of the novel, where Uncle Toby is finally able to acknowledge his love for Widow Wadman but only, it seems, with a Bible open to the book of Joshua, the passage about the siege of Jericho. Why this passage? And why does Sterne purposefully misnumber and rearrange these chapters of his novel? The mock fortifications that Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim build together, those replicas of military sieges happening in Europe, work in the novel as metaphors for the ways that all books – whether philosophy, scripture, or fiction – can both distance us from difficult intimate relationships and make room to repair them.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Rethinking the Secular Origins of the NovelThe Bible in English Fiction 1678–1767, pp. 231 - 257Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021